Born in the Ontario village of Almonte in 1861, James Naismith was a hardworking athlete who excelled at many sports, and who chafed when the long Canadian winter kept him from playing outdoors, resulting in added pounds and lost strength.

Naismith moved to Massachusetts, where he taught physical education at a small Christian college. The winter weather of New England was no better than that of Ontario, but the school had an assembly hall with moveable benches and a hardwood floor. Naismith concocted a game suited to the room’s high ceiling and rectangular plan, a game that combined elements of soccer, football, hockey, and baseball and that emphasized teamwork and friendly, nonviolent competition. Naismith’s invention made use of a regulation soccer ball that, instead of being kicked, was bounced or passed by hand from one end of the room to the other and launched into a peach basket hung at either end—which gave the new game its name, basketball.

James Naismith holding a ball and a peach basket, the first basketball equipment. Credit: UPI/Bettmann Archive

First played with nine members on each team, Naismith’s game quickly spread throughout New England, and then elsewhere in the United States. By 1896 enough colleges had formed teams that the first extramural competition was held, but now with only five players to a team.

Two years later, the first professional basketball league was organized. In the next few years, with Naismith’s approval, new rules were devised to insure that the game would be played in a friendly spirit. Most important of the new rules were those defining fouls and the penalties for them, most of which allowed the fouled player to take possession of the ball and sometimes to throw it without opposition. Other rules helped speed the game by pitting play against a clock, and not by an accumulation of points, which could and often did take hours to achieve. The game evolved over the decades, with the addition of yet other rules over the years, including one that allowed players to shoot with one hand—an innovation that gave rise to the spectacular balletic moves of players like Lew Alcindor (later Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) and Wilt Chamberlain in the 1960s and ’70s.

Important technical innovations to the game came early on. One was the addition of nets to the baskets, which allowed the ball to fall through and be retrieved on the court; earlier, a referee or player had to climb a ladder to pluck the ball from the wooden baskets of old. Another was the addition of a backboard to the basket—an innovation meant not for the shooter’s convenience, but instead to keep fans of the defending team from sticking their arms into the basket and blocking the opposing team’s shot.

Basketball traveled to France and England in 1893, to Germany in 1894, and to Japan in 1900. It became an official Olympic event at the 1936 Berlin Games, which hastened its spread to many other countries. Throughout the Cold War, international basketball courts took the place of battlefields, with the United States and the Soviet Union competing neck-and-neck for domination of the game. The collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s did not remove politics from basketball. In the place of the old superpower competition came rivalries among teams from the former republics of Yugoslavia, for instance, and between players from the People’s Republic of China and Taiwan.

Other countries have developed strong teams in recent years, and sometimes in the unlikeliest of places. In recent years, the tiny Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, for instance, has fielded three dozen amateur teams, while the principality of Andorra, with only 86,500 inhabitants, sponsored nine amateur teams while establishing the sport as part of the country’s physical education curriculum. Even the Himalayan nation of Nepal now boasts a professional team.

But nowhere is basketball more popular than in the United States, the game’s birthplace 122 years ago. Once restricted to the long northerly winter, basketball’s calendar has grown to embrace every season—and now that March madness has wound down and spring has begun, the NCAAFinal Four competition is upon us, as it is sure to be every April for years to come.